Welcome!

I'm Stéphane Caron, a post-doc researcher at
LIRMM IDH,
CNRS, France, interested in multi-contact motion
planning and control for humanoid robots. Before working here, I completed my
PhD at the University of Tokyo (東京大学), Japan, where I was a student of the
Nakamura Lab. You can reach me at
stephane.caron@normalesup.org.
I answer all messages encrypted with my GPG
key (0x330CB35B).

Wikimedia Foundation

I publicly, financially and unconditionally support the
Wikimedia Foundation. Anytime I
want to learn something new, the first place I go to is
Wikipedia. I'm learning a lot of robotics from
there too!

Open Access

I'm a strong supporter of
Open access and believe
in the model of Epijournals. Epijournals
overlay the current peer-reviewing process onto pre-print repositories (like
arXiv,
HAL or
Zenodo), so that researchers continue
to do what they are already doing, but the output is public. Furthermore, the
review process would not stop after a paper is accepted to an epijournal: new
readers could write post-publication reviews on the epi-journal's web platform,
and also upvote or downvote other reviews, as is currently done on Q&A
platforms such as Stack overflow.

Transparency

Here is one of the main deals of a democracy: you delegate your power (over
your street, your city, your state, etc.) to selected people, who in turn get
powerful but need to report back on what they do, that is, to be
accountable. To make sure of this, other people called journalists
should follow their deeds and propagate the info back into society.

Now, there are two major issues with this structure. Accountability being a
weight to bear, some powerful people argue that they need secrecy,
that is, the right to do whatever they want without being held accountable for
it. This is a dangerous slope, as it brings us back to the non-democratic
system (think of the NSA in the USA). To prevent this,
Wikileaks draws a clear line:
transparency, which means whatever government people do is public.
Given the maturity that the Internet has reached, I believe that this system is
now doable, therefore I publicly and financially support Wikileaks in their
action to make it a reality.

The second major issue we have with the basic deal of democracy lies with
journalists. Even assuming that the info was fully transparent, we would still
need people to work it out and analyze what powerful people (government
officials, company directors, etc.). Now, the problem we have is that
journalists
live in the same social group as powerful people, while mainstream media
are owned by moguls. To help counter this phenomenon, I publicly and
financially support Acrimed, a journalist
association dedicated to fact checking and analysis of mainstream media.

Internet Politics

What is your stance on “intellectual property”? Should we create an
artificial “market” for ideas? What does a society gain or lose by
making such a decision? On this topic, Lawrence Lessig gave a brilliant talk at
OSCON 2002 on
free culture
(31'40). I support the Electronic Frontier Foundation to push
for this line of thinking.

A second trending topic is network neutrality. Governments have already started
to regulate and monitor our computer networks, and they do so out of public
reach (secretly, as the NSA in the USA, or behind closed-doors, like the EU
government does). I give money to
La Quadrature du net to defend
our citizen rights in ongoing EU policymaking, as a counter-power to balance
private and government interests.